she unveils the still heart of the film, her
face trapped in closeup while she croons
"N ew York, New York," at a crawling
tempo. Mulligan gives it her all, but, as so
often in "Shame," you can't help consid-
ering the context. Would everyone in a
N ew York hot spot go quiet for five min-
utes in order to listen politely to what is,
in essence, a private distress call? Mc-
Qgeen, aided by his screenwriter, Abi
Morgan, has stitched together a bespoke
idea of the city rather than the place itself:
in the same way that he frames erotic pur-
suit more as a neat conceptual art work
than as the farrago of lunging, dithering,
yearning, and near-farce in which most of
society wallows. To Brandon's credit, he
tries to proceed normally with Marianne
(Nicole Beharie), a colleague from the
office, taking her to dinner and making
non-horny conversation, but, when they
finally arrive at the boudoir, guess what?
He can't get it up. McQgeen might as
well have hung a sign around Brandon's
neck that read 'Warning: Cannot Mix
Emotion and Sex." If you want to see the
same baffiement, vented with ten times
the subdety, check out Warren Beatty, in
"Bonnie and Clyde," slumping away from
Faye Dunaway and murmuring, "I told
you I warn't no lover boy."
Yet, for all this, "Shamè' compels at-
tention. Amid its pious devotion to the
woebegone, there are scenes that manage
to twitch into life and hit a nerve, perhaps
because they also bump the funny bone.
Take the wordless subway ride, early in the
movie, that finds Brandon, impeccably
swathed in coat and scarf: sitting diago-
nallyopposite a young woman. To witness
the back-and-forth of their flirtation is like
watching Nadal versus Federer on clay.
Topspin smiles are dinked across the car,
lips are slyly moistened, and McQgeen
even lobs in a late twist, as the woman
proves to be wearing not just a kindly smile
but a wedding ring-a combination guar-
anteed to stir our herò s loins. The entire
sequence is perfect, and PC-rated, and if
"Shamè' had stopped there it would have
been a poem. Instead, there is a novel's
worth of grinding still to come, and, by the
end, all that I could think of: however re-
spectful of the :film's aplomb, was the brisk
advice delivered by the aging Flaubert to
his satyr of a protégé, Cuy de Maupassant,
in 1878: "You complain about fucking
being 'monotonous.' Therè s a very simple
remedy: stop doing it."
^ nother film, another mirthless pano-
r\. ply of flesh. In "Sleeping Beauty,"
the Australian director Julia Leigh tells
the tale of Lucy (Emily Browning), a stu-
dent famished for cash. Usually, she turns
tricks to boost her income, picking up
men in a bar as if they were litter, but she
soon enrolls in a mysterious escort service.
Her duties include waitressing, half nude,
at dinners arranged by an exclusive club,
and later, for a larger fee, taking a sleep-
ing draught and submitting, like a warm
corpse, to the attentions, foul and foolish,
of old white men.
The politics of "Sleeping Beauty" are
not difficult to read; if"Shame" treats the
libido as little more than a lonely subset
of fluid mechanics, Leigh's work decon-
structs it as a weapon in the armory of
patriarchal oppression, and the voyeurs
who prey upon Lucy, with hand, tongue,
and eye, are themselves repugnant to ob-
serve. Then, there are the fripperies;
could we please agree to a moratorium on
masks, cutaway leather lingerie, and other
bondage-flavored evening garb? This
kind of thing was about as arousing as a
golfer's knitwear when Kubrick dragged
it into "Eyes Wide Shut," and it still
strikes me as the asexual's idea of what sex
is meant to look like-hot, robotic, and
vaguely European, as if Victorià s Secret
had been bought out by a company of
Freemasons.
So why does "Sleeping Beauty" linger
and doze in the mind while "Shamè' wan-
ders away? The best answer is Emily
Browning. With her skin pallor verging on
translucence, and a long, tigerish mane, she
could be a Victorian dream of the untouch-
able, and you can picture Millais and Ros-
setti dropping their brushes at the sight of
her. On the other hand, those parts of
"Sleeping Beauty" which release Lucy from
her creepy trade reveal her as a regular Aus-
sie: sane, jokey, and easily bored-honest,
too, as when she visits a friend who is
drinking himself to death and, without
ado, pours vodka instead of milk on his ce-
real. To be at once earthy and ethereal is an
uncommon gift. I noticed it, in Browning,
when she starred in "Lemony Snicket's A
Series of Unfortunate Events" (2004), as
the calmly eccentric Violet Baudelaire. Al-
ready, as a teen-ager, she seemed older and
wiser than the events unfolding around her,
and, likewise, in "Sleeping Beauty," she im-
pugns the drooling antics of the elderly.
They fling her about like a doll, but it is
they-all the fantasists who believe that sex
makes them grand and sinister, as opposed
to ridiculous-who should wake up. .
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
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